As far as I can judge from my reading of newsgroups and mailing lists, CentOS is neither more nor less reliable than Fedora.
I run Fedora on my home system, but uses Scientific Linux (RHEL clone) at work, and can tell you for a *fact* Scientific Linux is much more stable than Fedora. It simply doesn't get major package updates. All that are pushed out are important security updates when needed.
Very few software errors arise because some developer is trying something daring. 99% of problems occur simply because someone makes a silly blunder, and that is just as likely to happen anywhere.
Of course. No one instroduces a bug on purpose. But then we are back to the point that unless you only discover bugs which are hardware dependent by running on that hardware. If the developers/testers don't have this hardware, then it falls to the users to find the bug.
I find this "Fedora is bleeding edge" excuse rather absurd.
Fedora is bleeding edge because it gets much more major package updates. For instance, during the lifetime of a Fedora release it is common to get major new versions of packages like KDE, gnome or the kernel. By major I mean things like KDE going from 3.4.6 to 3.5.7 pr the kernel going from 2.6.21 to 2.6.22.
A *stable* distro, like RHEL simply does not do this. You only updates when they are absolutely nessary for security for instance, and even then Rehdat go to the effort of back-porting the patches to the released version instead of updating to the new major.
This is where Fedora differs to some distros, and its this churning around that makes bugs more likely to creep in
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